I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away."

What you need to understand about the apocalypse is that you aren't Mad Max. You're part of the skull pyramid in the background.

So here we are, a new thread for a new campaign. Here we'll discuss what food to eat, when we can't make it, and other such things. But I'll also post setting details every now and then. Since EP's setting is rather... big it would be a good idea to print out such things and keep them handy during the sessions.

I think I'll also post headlines from major news services before every session. Most of it will just be flavortext and background information, unrelated to the missions at hand. But hey you never know. Might be some clues in there.

And for those reading along who aren't part of this game: Eclipse Phase is a transhuman game of conspiracy and horror. The Earth was lost ten years ago in a war against AI enemies of our own creation called the TITANs. We lost. They achieved singularity and left the solar system, apparently creating stable wormhole systems to do so, no longer interested in competing against the insignificant transhumans.

But their creations, biowar plagues, nanoswarm weapons, and sleeper agents persist. The solar system isn't safe. And even if we had nothing to fear from the TITANs, there will always be those of our own kind ready to make things worse for the rest of us...

What you need to understand about the apocalypse is that you aren't Mad Max. You're part of the skull pyramid in the background.

After a horrific war all of transhumankind is now united in purpose and creed, right? Nope! Due to the impact of emerging technologies and the remoteness of habitats across the solar system, there's all sorts of agendas, political models, and ideals. Getting to know the EP setting has to start here.

The Hypercorps

Although the old megacorps of Earth have all disappeared, their next evolutionary step is already here - the hypercorps. With most of them having little to no physical assets (infomorphs and AI can do much of the work) and very few permanent employees, the hypercorps are sleek, fast, flexible legal entities. They are used to improvising, quickly pursuing new opportunities, and banding together in ad-hoc alliances to accomplish greater goals.

Although their strongholds lie mostly around the inner planets, hypercorp interests are spread all over the system. They are the founders and primary backers of the modern traditional, credit-based economy. All in all there are thousands of hypercorps, with a few dozen of them being truly powerful allies or enemies to have.

Jovian Republic

A military fascist collective orbiting Jupiter. They are bioconservative and restrict access to several modern technologies to its citizens, such as nanofabrication, cloning, and uploading. They combine aspect from South American dictatorships and U.S. American political lobbyism, resulting in a powerful military-industrial complex.

The intense gravity of Jupiter makes it ideal for slingshot-accelerating travel between planets, a practice that can shave months or years off the voyage. The Republic (also called the Jovian Junta by its detractors) imposes a tax on anyone who wants to make use of their planet this way, enforced with arguably the most powerful military force in the system.

Lunar-Lagrange Alliance

This alliance based around the various habitats orbiting Earth was born out of necessity rather than ideology. In fact, internal division and polarization is high. The primary goal of the Alliance is to reclaim Earth and consequently restore their industrial and cultural sectors to unquestionable dominance. They have a significant hypercorp backing, particularly from the Lunar banking consortiums.

Morningstar Constellation

Morningstar is the alliance between the most important aerostat stations (floating balloon cities) in Venus' upper atmosphere. They are a very recent political bloc, formed mostly to protect Venus from hypercorp governance. Exactly which policies they do want is a topic still under internal discussion.

Planetary Consortium

The Consortium grew out of an alliance of hypercorp interests and today controls several habitats throughout the inner system, on Luna, Earth orbit, and particularly on and around Mars. They provide their citizens with cyberdemocracy (a real-time voting system through the mesh), security, expansion, and prosperity. The democratic process is mostly for minor issues though, as the Hypercorp Council makes all the core policies.

The Consortium also advocates eugenics as a form of social responsibility, urging the need for transhumanity to reclaim their former strength. This also results in some discrimination against unmodified humans, synthetics, uplifted animals, and indentured infomorphs.

Tharsis League

A coalition of Mars' independent settlements to discuss matters that concern them all. Debates center around terraforming, the Planetary Consortium, progress, and trade. Several cities maintain Consortium ties and they are often accused of selling out martian interests to the hypercorps. The non-Consortium cities, in turn, are accused of obstruction, anti-corporate prejudice, and maintaining ties to the Barsoomians - the Martian underclass resistance/terrorists.

Autonomist Alliance

A patchwork alliance between...

1. Anarchists, collections of empowered individuals into non-hierarchical collectives. Thanks to shared resources and the limitless potential of nanofabrication, some stations really do manage to maintain this type of society.

2. Extropia, a station within the main asteroid belt that serves as the "Switzerland" of the solar system. They believe in a system where all relations are based on mutually agreed upon contracts. Unlike the anarchists they do believe in private property. Extropians maintain extensive ties with both the hypercorps and the non-credit economies of the true autonomists. Although not fully trusted by either group, they have some unique benefits. To the hypercorps, Extropia is a tax shelter and whitewashing opportunity. To the autonomists, Extropia is a place to obtain hypercorp-designed cutting edge tech without having to deal with corporates or their backwards economy.

3. Scum barges, nomadic space travelers. With no place to truly call home but their ships, scum wander around as criminals, con artists, and gypsie markets. But they also permit nearly everything and contain some of the more eccentric and visionary artists. Scum raves are some of the most notorious affairs transhumankind has ever seen, full with bizarre new drugs and bodies designed exclusively for partying.

4. Titan Commonwealth, a technosocialist democracy based on one of Saturn's moons.

What you need to understand about the apocalypse is that you aren't Mad Max. You're part of the skull pyramid in the background.

Besides factions which are primarily based on governments and other influential players there are also important socio-political movements. I'll provide a brief overview of the most important ones, along with their memes (in the traditional sense of the word, not the internet cat pictures meaning) and main areas of influence.

This group believes that scientific advancement, spread along all of transhumankind, is the best chance they have to combat threats similar to the TITANs. Indeed, their scientific expertise was invaluable in the war. They serve as consultants and researches but often take payment in the form of freedom of information - a hypercorp may need to make public the source code for a program, for example.

This group grows increasingly discontent with hypercorp control over Mars. Influenced by autonomist models, they strife towards a more egalitarian social structure. A few radicals have taken to armed conflict which escalated the situation drastically. Relationships between the hypercorps and Barsoomians is cold at best.

There exist many who oppose the newer technologies, especially after the Fall. They range from right-wing cultural conservatists to left-wing environmentalists, religious groups, and extremists who take to sabotage and terrorism (fortunately these are a tiny minority).

Brinkers
Memes: Isolationism.

Within the vast solar system exist dozens if not hundreds of tiny societies, each dedicated to their own unique cultures. Collectively they are referred to as brinkers but they typically share little in common with on another safe for a desire to maintain their way of life. There are religious cults, exiles, social experiments, political extremists, post-Fall doomsday survivalists, family clans, criminal outfits, bohemian art enclaves, and many more.

Exhumans
Memes: Adaptability, Hyper-Evolution, Singularity.

For some, transhumanism isn't enough and they strife for posthumanism, a society evolved past the point they retain anything we'd describe as human. Although the methods differ between exhuman groups, generally speaking they seek to transcend into a higher being. This may mean gene-coding a superior body, increasing their intellect, converting into hyper-intelligent digital hiveminds, or other such things. Most of these projects end up in disaster and leave the exhumans quite insane, if they weren't so already.

The term mercurial is a catch-all term for the non-human elements of transhumans: uplifted animals and high grade AI. In many societies these beings are treated as pets, property, or at least second class citizens. The mercurial movement strifes for civil rights for such beings. A large number of sympathetic humans also stand by them.

While the typical environmentalist warns against the dangers of technology and transhuman impact upon the worlds around them, Nano-ecologists see science as the solution itself. With modern nanotechnology projects can be accomplished with more precision and less polution. It's a recently developed approach as a compromise between hypercorp interests and bioconservative concerns and is rapidly growing in popularity, becoming a social movement of its own.

More than just conservative, this group believes in a total no-impact approach when it comes to inhabiting new worlds. Any form of life, no matter how primitive or microbial, must be kept from contamination. They are greatly concerned about the future of the lifeforms on Europa (Jupiter's moon) and those found on exoplanets beyond the Pandora wormholes. They typically also oppose fusion and antimatter power.

Regaining control of Earth and freeing it from the fallout of the war and the TITANs-spawned horrors that still dwell there is the ultimate goal of this group. Travel to Earth is currently illegal for security reasons but the Reclaimers are suspected of funding secret recon missions and even preparing for terraforming.

Modern technology has made transhumans practically immortal. And of course there are those with fantastic levels of wealth, such as hypercorp leaders, media icons, clan heads, oligarchs, or criminal kingpins. This has resulted in a nouveau riche class whose parents or superiors are fantastically wealthy... and will never die to pass on that wealth. This new class of people is rich and bored and often spoiled, never knowing hardship or responsibilities. These glitterati indulge themselves in over the top lifestyles and lavish parties, as the media drinks in all their glamour and scandals. Naturally there are endless cliques and shifting alliances, along with drama, rivalries, groupies, armies of servants, and outlandish one-upmanship.

An elitist school of thought in the purest sense of the word: they believe in personal perfection, applying eugenics and rigorous training to become the best transhumans they can possibly be. Life is seen as a constant battle for survival and they seek to constantly evolve, physically and mentally, to meet all challenges. Although seen by some as a fascist society they are still popular as mercenaries and enjoy some sympathies from successful hypercorp executives and athletes.
See, I told you EP's setting is big.

What you need to understand about the apocalypse is that you aren't Mad Max. You're part of the skull pyramid in the background.

Ben: reading up on the Factions is more important than the Movements, so if you don't have time to read it all, prioritize those.

More in general, we'll first have to discuss what kind of game we'd like to have. We know you're working for Firewall, a clandestine organization which operates in the shadows to protect transhumankind of existential threats - TITAN relics, weapons of mass destruction, and so on. You may be sent on all sorts of missions but what would you gentlemen like to do most? Wetwork, suppressing information, investigating hypercorps, monitoring the TITAN-infested quarantine zone on Mars, sabotage, etc. are all possible scenarios. It's perfectly fine if you all three make social-focused characters if you agree that you'd like deception and infiltration to have a prominent role in your missions.

What you need to understand about the apocalypse is that you aren't Mad Max. You're part of the skull pyramid in the background.

1. It's hidden away in the book but I found it, all bodies bought during character creation are done with CP, not money.

2. If you have multiple bodies, be aware that you'll also need to pay some cash for the body bank (storage).

3. If the Knowledge skills are unsatisfying to really work with, I'll allow keeping some points in reserve which you may spend at a later time. And then we'll retcon them in. ("Why yes, I've always had a keen interest in religious cults!")

4. Browsing through the supplements I discovered that neo-gorilla bodies are slightly more popular than other uplifts due to their media status from movies and comics and the like. Many a security guard or thug is quite literally a gorilla in a suit.

What you need to understand about the apocalypse is that you aren't Mad Max. You're part of the skull pyramid in the background.

on a more serious note, i'm afraid i'm going to have to cancel for tuesday 24-03. i'm off to see Mars Red Sky with V at dB's. to compensate, i'm going to do some research, read the character gen stuff, make some notes and be ready to finalise my character asap the next time we play. how far did you and robin get after we left yesterday?